‘Nevermind’ producer Butch Vig: ‘Kurt Cobain’s solo album was just in his head’

Garbage drummer is skeptical that the Nirvana singer ever recorded any solo material

‘Nevermind’ producer Butch Vig has said he is very skeptical that Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain ever recorded a solo album.

Earlier this month, Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson was quoted as saying that Cobain had recorded a whole album’s worth of solo demos before he died in 1994, which no-one has ever heard.

Erlandson said: “He was headed in a direction that was really cool. It would have been his ‘White Album’. That’s really what he was going towards, a solo album but working with different people.”

But, according to Vig, the tracks Erlandson is talking about only existed in Cobain’s mind and have almost certainly never been recorded.

Speaking to NME, Vig responded to a question about whether such a solo album existed by saying: “He was working on songs, but they were just in his head. He might have just played them to Eric.”

Vig added that in the period Erlandson is talking about, Cobain only wanted to talk about wife Courtney Love’s new album, Hole‘s ‘Live Through This’ and didn’t really discuss his own material. He said of this: “Around that period he only wanted to talk about Courtney’s album, I never heard any of his new songs.”

To read the rest of the interview with Vig, pick up the new issue of NME which is on UK newsstands and available digitally now.

You can watch a video of Nirvana’s ’10 Best Songs’ by scrolling down to the bottom of the page and clicking.